The Braintrust: A Harmony of Enemies Read online

  Ben said, “In case this makes a difference, I am also handily available as an outpatient. Probably alone among your candidates, I live on the BrainTrust.”

  Dash looked at him. “Yes, I see here you live on the ship with all the startup companies, the Dreams Come True.” She shook her head. “I have read that most BrainTrusters who make many millions move dirtside. I understand no amount of money can get you a cabin larger than the standard one.”

  He nodded. “My cabin is the same size as yours. Much of the value of the BrainTrust comes from the very high density of very smart residents bouncing ideas and opportunities off each other. It’s an interesting economic problem, actually. The BrainTrust cannot extract maximum profits without damaging the very characteristic that makes it worth so much.” He shrugged. “Of course, being a composable mobile archipelago, there is a solution, and the problem is being solved as we speak. A new purely residential isle ship, the Haven, is being built in San Diego by a consortium of billionaires. When it’s ready, they plan to attach it to the BrainTrust. You’ll be able to buy outright a living space any size you can afford. The investors get first pick, of course. I thought about joining them myself.” He smiled wickedly. “Well, I more than thought about it. I bought a stake in the project, including a snug little four-thousand-square-foot apartment.” He shook his head. “But that’s strictly a rental. I already have guests lined up. Meanwhile, I’m going to stay in my little cabin on Dreams. That’s where most of my investments are, and the youngsters keep me invigorated. I’m surrounded by other angry young men just like myself.”

  Angry young men like himself? Dash again controlled her demeanor as she choked back a laugh. “Would you not consider yourself at least an angry middle-aged man at this point in your life?”

  Ben laughed so long and hard tears formed in his eyes. “Heavens no, Dr. Dash. Angry old men are bitter. Angry young men are infuriated by how poorly the world works, how many problems remain to be solved, and they are hot on the path to solving those problems. That’s a better characterization of me than the other.” He paused reflectively. “Indeed, the number of proper angry young men is small, even among chronologically youthful people. I still have to work to find them, even in the hothouse of creative energy you find here.”

  His attitude was so odd that Dash wondered if there were something wrong with him mentally, something more subtle than dementia. If the procedure developed complications, what effect would it have on his recovery?

  He was watching her, and he deduced that something was amiss. “Do you know why I’m investing in your research? As I explained earlier, I didn’t expect to become a patient.”

  “Because you believe that my therapy can develop into a billion-dollar business?”

  “Ah, but it won’t become a billion-dollar business, Dr. Dash.” He paused, relishing the explanation. “It’ll become a trillion-dollar business. I would enjoy being the world’s first trillionaire.” He shrugged. “Though, because of the way the profits will be divided, you and the other investors would follow very closely behind me.”

  “I see.” She was about to let him go, but one other question struck her. It was not relevant or necessary, but she just wanted to know. “Tell me, Mr. Wilson, before coming to the BrainTrust, most of your investments were in America, correct? What made you decide to come here in the beginning?”

  Ben sighed. “I started thinking about leaving when California hiked the tax rate to seventy percent a few years ago. Fortunately there were enough loopholes, exemptions, and exceptions that I could live with it. The last straw was the billion-dollar lawsuit.”

  “A billion-dollar lawsuit? What could they sue you for a billion-dollars for?”

  “Well, my firm, the Wilson-Petra Fund, had been growing faster every year for almost a decade. Then we had our first bad year. Instead of growing handily, the fund shrank a little bit. The fact that we didn’t do as well as projected by the analysts was used in a class action suit as de facto proof of managerial incompetence and fraud.” He shrugged. “They’ve been doing that to successful businesses for decades. My grandfather was involved in one of these lawsuits back in 1991, when a Silicon Valley CAD company told the analysts their quarterly profits would go down because they were going to invest more in R&D. This was hardly the decision of incompetent management, but it served the lawyers’ purpose. The day after the increase in R&D was announced the stock tanked, and the day after that three different law firms rushed to court to request authority to represent the stockholders in a class action.”

  “So you lost all your money?” Now Dash had to worry about whether he could pay the bill. It would be very hard on the budget to have to swallow the costs of a bankrupt patient at this stage.

  Ben waved the question away. “Not all of it. We settled out of court for half a billion. I sold out as quickly as I could—not very fast, since venture capital is not that good a game for quick churning—but fast enough.” He laughed. “Two years later, we doubled our profits over the year prior to the lawsuit.” He tapped the table, and his face was alive with wicked joy. “The state of California and the federal government both now want to put me in jail for tax evasion.”

  “Oh, dear.” Every time he answered her and told her not to worry, he introduced a new cause for concern. “Is there any risk that they will take you back in the middle of your therapy?”

  Ben was again laughing so hard he had to hold his stomach; the man seemed to spend much of his time laughing uproariously. “Don’t let the Feds worry you. Colin promised them that when the Dreams Come True completes its current cruise, it’ll call on a port with an extradition treaty. He guaranteed that he’d send me back for trial first thing once they dropped anchor.”

  Colin again. Dash really had to find out who he was some time. Out of curiosity, she’d looked in the BrainTrust crew directory, but hadn’t found him. She refocused on Ben. “But the BrainTrust ships never end their cruises, and never enter ports.”

  Ben nodded. “Exactly.”

  ***

  A bouncy college-age girl with long golden hair appeared in the doorway. “We’ll be right with you,” she said brightly. “It’ll just take a moment to maneuver Gran into your office. Dash watched in bemusement as two other blond women, one perhaps high school-age, one a thirtyish version of the first, maneuvered a wheelchair into Dash’s office. Dash dragged her table with Ganesha off to one side and stood, leaning on the front of her desk to watch the procession.

  The youngest, a skinny teenager, looked down in embarrassment. “Sorry,” she said, “just getting her settled.”

  The prospective patient was finally revealed.

  An old woman sat in the wheelchair staring off to the side at Dash’s empty bookcase. Dash leaned forward “Mrs. Rainer? Anne Rainer?”

  The old woman turned her head. Dash could see that Anne had once had hair the same color as her grandchildren’s. Seeing Dash, Anne smiled. “Aisha?” she said. “I’m so delighted to see you again.” She held out her hand. “You’ve grown so much. I see you’ve done well.”

  Dash was frozen by this speech for a moment. The eldest of the blond attendants explained. “Aisha was one of Gran’s favorite students from her time in the Peace Corps.”

  Dash spoke gently. “I am afraid I am not Aisha, Mrs. Rainer. My name is Dash. Dr. Dash.”

  “Ah,” said Anne Rainer. “I get confused sometimes.”

  Dash replied, “As do we all sometimes.” A moment’s silence ensued.

  The college-age granddaughter ran a finger gently across Anne’s forehead, pushing a strand of hair to the side. “Granma was the first one to diagnose herself with dementia, you know.”

  “That happens once in a while with the brightest ones.” Dash sighed. “Let me be perfectly clear with you all about what is going to happen.” She started to explain the steps involved, leading up to the point where Dash would introduce pseudoviruses into their grandmother’s bloodstream. The three women followed her words with the inte
nsity of hawks watching a ground squirrel and nodded their heads as she continued her explanation.

  Finally the eldest interrupted. “The pseudovirus will lengthen the telomere chains on the nuclei in all Granma’s cells.”

  The middle one took over. “The telomeres, consequently, will give the cells permission to replicate—”

  And the teenager finished, “Replacing damaged cells with new ones.”

  Dash concluded that perhaps Anne’s intelligence, which had enabled her to build a post-social media empire, had run true through two generations.

  Dash finished with a warning. “Let us be clear,” she said sternly. “Even if this does work, there is reason to doubt it will cure her dementia. Of all the test patients we have accepted, Mrs. Rainer is the one least likely to benefit from this therapy. Our procedure here is best thought of as an outlying experiment-within-an-experiment that is already high-risk. Does everyone understand that?”

  All three women nodded. For a moment it looked like Anne had nodded in understanding as well, but then she began to gently snore.

  ***

  The time had come for the Emeryville Chapter of the Earth Liberation Crusade to comport themselves with a modicum of discretion. Peter had told his three friends to cool it with the Green movement slogans. He himself had gone to extreme lengths to hide his real goals and methods, purchasing a t-shirt that had nothing to do with his Green agenda. Now his shirt matched the flags waving informally on a couple of the isle ships, a dark blue ocean and a light blue sky in the background of a bright yellow sunrise. The sunrise backlit the silhouette of a sailing ship with the Statue of Liberty instead of a mast rising from the center.

  These people on the BrainTrust thought freedom and liberty were the touchstones of civilization. So hopelessly retro. Freedom, liberty, even the nation-states that tried to defend such things were dead-ends. Only a global government with both the absolute power and the ruthless willingness to suppress the desires of all the greedy humans in order to protect the greater good could successfully deal with the ever-growing host of planet-spanning environmental issues.

  Peter was sure that once all the people were united these mobile islands would be destroyed as an obvious part of protecting the planet. Alas, the day of unity continued to lie just a little too far in the distance, like a rainbow that you could drive toward or walk toward but never quite reach. He still didn’t understand why a global government hadn’t arisen after most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet broke off and raised sea levels. You’d think that once Miami drowned and the state of Florida shrank to the Everglades Territory people would have woken up, but no. Instead, the Red president blamed the Blues, declared martial law, stacked the Supreme Court, and declared himself President-for-Life to thundering applause. Sigh.

  Anyway, Peter had donned one of the symbols of the enemy to keep them confused. His friends, however, just couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of being a little circumspect. After all, they were only smuggling enough explosives to hollow out the entire Los Angeles subway system.

  Mary was wearing her own idea of a non-controversial slogan, which was “Go Green or Scream”. Paul had demonstrated a reasonable amount of sensitivity with “Don’t be Mean, Go Green.” Justin was almost as clueless as Mary, with “Demand Clean and Green.” Justin of all of them should have been the most prudent, since he was carrying the primary bomb ingredient.

  The guard at the x-ray machine looked bemused as Justin put an entire case of Evian water on the conveyor belt. Justin looked at the guard and blushed. “I just don’t trust anybody’s water but my own.”

  The guard shook his head. Another guard whispered to him, and he looked at Mary’s hostile expression and the t-shirt and turned cold. Mary’s suitcase got the closest scrutiny of all.

  As they walked away, Justin whispered to Peter, “That was a nice touch, having Mary distract the guards while I came through with the—”

  Peter whispered back urgently. “With the water. With the water.”

  “Right. The water.”

  And it was indeed water, though Justin had enhanced it considerably in his basement. Evian would be surprised to know that they now bottled CHP, otherwise known as concentrated hydrogen peroxide.

  Paul caught up with them. “When does the conference start?” Their justification for coming to the BrainTrust was to attend a conference on Making the Oceans Bloom: Life and CO2 Sequestration in the Dead Zone. Peter had the feeling that Paul was almost as interested in the conference as he was in blowing the hell out of a nuke plant. And, Peter confessed to himself, it would have been interesting if it weren’t built on the backs of the poor, who had lost their jobs to the BrainTrust robots and would one day lose their lives to radioactive contaminants when something went wrong.

  “Conference starts in the morning,” Justin told him. “We’ll have to attend a few sessions while we’re scoping out the ships and finding a suitable reactor target.”

  Peter growled, “I already told you, I got reliable info on the location of the reactor—at least on the Chiron. It’s in the middle of the Red Planet deck.” He had a friend who worked on the Chiron. When Peter had asked, he had answered without hesitation.

  Justin scowled. “Yeah, I heard you the first time. I’m telling you it doesn’t make any sense. I still think the nukes are in the underwater pylons.”

  “Which is why we’re gonna check it out. If the center of the Red Planet deck is sealed off, we’ll know.” Peter shook his head in disgust. The immorality of the BrainTrust designers and engineers was unspeakable. The reactor was in the middle of a damn hospital, surrounded by people trying to recover from terrible illnesses and injuries. Might as well put the reactor in the middle of a school! Probably was, come to think of it, at least on the BrainTrust University. He clenched his fists. Well, for his own purposes, it was a good arrangement. When the nuke blew, it would take out the thousands of innocent bystanders who had come here to be healed. The mass deaths would put a nice exclamation point on the operation.

  Peter reminded everyone of the next step. “Ok, people, you all know the next part, right? Off to the bars to drink.”

  Everybody nodded their heads. Justin smiled wolfishly. “Vodka. Each of you has to bring a bottle back to our rooms tonight. Two bottles would be better.”

  Paul threw in the obvious warning. “Only one bottle from each bar we visit.”

  Mary shrugged. “There’re plenty of bars. We could bring a dozen bottles each without anyone being any wiser.”

  Justin shook his head. “I can’t distill that much into pure ethanol with the equipment I’ll be able to set up. Don’t run a risk by getting more than we can use.”

  They arrived at the two adjacent cabins they had rented on Elysian Fields. Peter realized they still had a couple days’ work to do, between scoping out the target, making the ethanol, and the final assembly. At least the rooms weren’t too expensive.

  ***

  Jamal was already swearing as they left their cabin. The rooms here were shockingly expensive, even for someone with the backing of the village elders. He had to find his wife before he ran out of money. He could just see himself confiscating Amu’s hooker fund for part of another day’s fare.

  He considered the possibility that Jameela was not on the BrainTrust, that she had gone elsewhere. But he rejected the notion this time just as he had rejected it so many times before in the past days.

  He was near despair. There were fourteen isle ships in the archipelago, with over a hundred and twenty thousand people. There didn’t seem to be a central directory. How would he find her? Where in this Satan’s city was she? “We’ll split up,” he announced to his companions. “Amu, you go to the Chiron. Marjan, try the Dreams Come True. I’ll take the university ship.” He’d thought about sending Amu to the university ship, but the college coeds looked just like the hookers on the Elysian Fields. It would be awkward if Amu insulted the wrong powerful heathen’s daughter.

  ***
/>   Amu was growing bitter about his luck. They’d been here for several days and he still hadn’t had the chance to pick up a prostitute, even though he’d been surrounded by them constantly. His brother was a joyless celibate, unable to think about anything except bringing his heretic wife to justice. Soon, Amu was sure, they’d find Jameela, kill her, and depart, all without even one good bedding.

  He’d never have this opportunity again.

  Here on the Chiron there were far fewer hookers than on the Elysian Fields, where virtually all the younger women were advertising their assets. Still, there were a few. As he strolled down the promenade looking for Jameela, he lost his concentration several times as various hookers passed. During one of those lulls in his concentration he noticed a young Japanese girl. At least he thought she was Japanese. She was watching him.

  Wearing a sheer white silk camisole cut high above her midriff with very short pants and flip flops, she was surprisingly erotic despite her flat chest and skinny arms and legs. He thought it might have something to do with the strangely disturbing tattoos on her arms. As he drifted in her direction, he could make out the one tattoo as being a dragon. Odd for such a delicate girl to wear such a fierce bit of art. Breathing fire, no less. The other tattoo seemed more in keeping with her appearance, a thin, almost fragile bird taking flight. Even that bird, however, seemed to express a fierceness in its face and beak. Very odd.

  Whether it was the tattoos or something else, she was indeed erotic. She was also the first hooker to show an interest in him. Clearly unattached.

  If he’d only had enough money for one hooker he probably wouldn’t have considered her, but perhaps she had a voluptuous friend. They could share.

  She pulled a piece of her short black hair into her mouth for a second and smiled. Amu smiled back. This was it, he realized. He tapped out a quick text to his brother explaining that he had just about finished searching the promenade on the Chiron and was going to take a break because he’d found an available hooker. He was going to take this opportunity, so they shouldn’t bug him.